Re: slash-package manager

Stefan Karrmann <[email protected]> wrote:
> How can a package manager set up a symlink for
> /package/admin/daemontools-0.76/package if it is not already installed
> and therefore /package/admin/daemontools-0.76/package/sharing is not
> available?

I don't see why you would want to do this.

> 3. Change tar-ball style. E.g.: Drop the category prefix, then
>    extracting package/sharing can be easily done to stdout.

It can already be done with a little effort.  Look through the output
of "tar -tf foo.tar"; the shortest line (there will probably be only
one anyway) matching '-[0-9].*/package/sharing$' is the right file.
Then pass that to "tar -xOf foo.tar".

>      (b) A trojan package cannot poke a file into another package anymore.
>      (c) The package need not be unpacked by root, the package manager
>          can change the uid before calling anything of the package.
>          This may prevent unintended mistakes.

This can already be done with the existing tarball format.  A package
manager can inspect the tarball to find the package directory, create
that directory owned by a unique id, unpack the tarball as that id,
and then chown it back to root.


paul